January 06
On Pinter
I direct your attention to this engaging, thoughtful response to the news of Pinter’s death by my friend and colleague Dan Rebellato (a pretty notable contemporary playwright himself) on the Royal Holloway Creative Writing course blog. It meditates upon Dan’s own indebtedness to Pinter, the way his dialogue works (’Technically - and boringly - his language is fiercely performative. It’s not what people are saying it’s that they are saying it and what they are doing by saying it‘), his affinity with Python (I think the Python boys are often underappreciated as theatrical writers; their dialogue is often first class) and what he did when Dan accosted him on the street. It’s worth your time.
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January 05
Teaching the Overdetermined Image
As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job’s patience. You show them a panel from the surprisingly awful Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator like, say, this
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January 04
It’s always already been the end of epic film.
Whether he knows it or not—and “he” being Adam Kotsko, I’ll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form. I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode. Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace.
Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word. They should surround some subject matter, be “on every side” “wholly or partially,” as per the OED. They should be self-contained. Not that they shouldn’t be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations. Films can only intimate narrative epicness. They can’t achieve it.
“But!”
“But But But!"
Try me. Start listing epic films and I’ll start listing films with grandiose tableaux. The Lord of the Rings? Shot in that sewer of New Zealand. Blade Runner? The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott’s matte painters. With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen. Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight.
Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen. Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it. Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger’s Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it’s impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium. (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for “good" on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.)
Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen. A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films. To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere’s own Leverage, I can’t help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen.
(x-posted about.)
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January 02
Urine-coloured, pooch-screwing
I had read it before, but at speed; this Christmas, though, gave me the opportunity to read it again. And so I did. It made me think: why do I keep going back to Martin Amis? I suppose it is because I like the idea of Amis. I just can’t seem to get my actually-reading-Amis ducks in a row.
What am I talking about? Yellow Dog (2003) that’s what. Science Fictional (alt-historical) or at the least satiric-phantasmagorical, Yellow Dog is set in a 2003 in which Henry IX sits on the throne of England—his wife is in a coma and his 15-year-old daughter subject to leering, video tabloidesque intrusions into her bathtime frolics. Henry is one character in Amis’s tale; another is Clint Smoker, a hack from a sub-Sun rag called Morning Lark. Another character is the improbable film-star, novelist, rock-star, ideal husband Xan Meo who gets clonked on the bonce and undergoes a change of personality into an obnoxious spoiling-for-a-fight alpha male. Then there’s Joseph Andrews, an elderly Brit-gangster even less believable than those delineated by Guy Ritchie. Hard to imagine, I know, but there you go. Amis sets these different storylines running, but seems clueless as to how to bring them back together again: he ends up literally smashing them into one another—very crudely handled. There’s also an underpowered conspiracy plotline that’s supposed to link them all, but which fails to do so.
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January 01
Congratulations, Mr. Bady
Aaron nabbed the 2008 Cliopatria Award for “Best Writer.” I say “nabbed,” but in truth, he earned it—I wouldn’t have asked him to contribute if I didn’t think he’d land us swag. Congratulations to Aaron and all the winners:
Best Group Blog: The Edge of the American West
Best Individual Blog: Northwest History
Best New Blog: Wynken de Worde
Best Post: Claire Potter, Tenured Radical, “What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do?”
Best Series of Posts: Tim Abbott on Trumbull’s The Death of General Montgomery, Jan. 12, Jan. 13, Jan. 14, Jan. 17, Jan. 18.
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December 31
Happy Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment!
I pray neither you nor yours hear the squeak before having the opportunity to wear one for a few decades.
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December 30
The Work of Christmas in the Age of TBS’s Twenty-Four Hours of A Christmas Story
If you’re like me, and A Christmas Story is its own kind of Christmas morning tradition, it’s become a unique cinematic experience. I’m not exactly sure when TBS started playing it back to back for the entire 24 hours of Christmas, but when they did, it was transformed from the movie that originally flopped in the theatres into something much more interesting. It was already somewhat formless; originally pieced together from a collection of Jean Shepherd stories (from In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash), the film gets unified as a narrative only by the looming end-times of Christmas, the child’s version of the rapture. Yet piling one screening after the other takes this formlessness to the next level: if you missed Flick putting his tongue on the flagpole the first time around, wait two hours and it’ll come around again. More to the point, the Christmas morning where Ralphie gets the gun is no longer a climax or a telos but simply the still center around which the entire thing turns, always present, always coming or going and coming again. If you know every line, the whole script will play over and over and over again, but thanks to TBS, it will even if you don’t. You can go outside and walk off that turkey if you want, and catch the flag-pole scene on the next viewing.
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December 28
Mama, Don’t Let Your Kids Grow Up to Be Grad Students
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Tip of the hat to an anonymous commenter over at Household Opera’s entry on Adjuncting in the Tar Pits:
I suppose part of the reason why I never considered a career in academia is that I am the child of an adjunct. My father was teaching at three different institutions when I was small, and later, as he gained more seniority, he was able to teach at just one. He teaches at a community college, and he was *finally* made a full-timer this year, at the age of 63, thanks to the union. The only reason we had (barely) enough money or health insurance growing up is that my mother taught in the local public schools. And funny enough, my mother is the one who went to a state school and my dad is the one who went to the Ivy. Dad’s employer, and lots of others are making more and more use of adjuncts and driving wages down to a despicable level. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
You can say that again.
I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
Thank you.
If you’re at the MLA annual convention in San Francisco and feeling, well, precarious, the discussion group for faculty serving contingently invites you to a guerilla happy hour at the Hilton’s Urban Tavern, Monday, December 29, beginning 4:30 pm. I’ll be there with young Emile, who may literally have bells on.
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December 26
Harold Pinter, RIP
Harold Pinter—Undeserving Laureate of a Prize that Doesn’t Matter Anymore Because Who Still Reads Literature Anyway?—died yesterday after a long struggle with esophageal cancer. He will be missed.
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December 23
The Rhet/Comp Article “At Least It’s An Ethos…” picked up by Inside Higher Ed
I like my original title pretty well, but otherwise a much improved version of my recent post “At Least It’s An Ethos” is up at InsideHigherEd, along with an up-to-the-minute stream of commenters in various kinds of apoplectic states. God bless them, every one.
Many thanks to IHE for picking up the article, and for their invaluable editorial advice. Here’s the link.
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December 22
A Pre-MLA Preview of the Annual Post-MLA Article
Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 124th of which begins next week in San Fransisco.
Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from “Neo-Victorian Buggery” to “Bambi as a Bottom” and the tragically hip “I Never Got Tenure (but I Owe My Job to Jay-Z): Capital-T Theory, Hip-Hop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Literary Studies.”
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association barely registered on the public consciousness for its first century. Professors attended to doze through papers about Chaucer and Emerson, schmooze one another and lobby for posts at more prestigious campuses. But in the 1980’s the conference became the site of annual skirmishes between old-school traditionalists and the increasing powerful new breed of postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists and queer-theory advocates.
Basking in this unaccustomed level of public notice, Modern Language Association scholars brought increasingly attention-grabbing papers to the convention through the 1990’s, “queering” the “canon,” some said, and championing the “postcolonial,” proposing wild theories about everything from comic books to hip-hop to television and movies. Last year, perhaps hoping to put a stop to the trend, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced its first Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative M.L.A. Paper Titles (a k a the Provokies) but in 2004 the Chronicle decided to drop the awards. Scott McLemee, a senior writer at Inside Higher Ed, explained that “crafting titles to get them written about and attacked in the press used to be exciting.
“Now it’s become a reflex, and their hearts aren’t really in it anymore.”
Not only are titles no longer intended to amuse, from the looks of this year’s several thousand entries, absolutely nothing of any importance is studied by scholars who present at the MLA. From “‘Nabakov’s Self-Translations” to an entire panel devoted to African literature, these scholars embrace topics no right-thinking person cares about. Would Joe the Plumber attend a talk on “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism”? Would Tito the Builder enjoy a twenty-minute talk on “History and Memory in [James Joyce’s] ‘The Dead’”? Does Joe Sixpack even know what PMLA is, much less want to be published in it? Why then would he attend the roundtable discussion “How to Get Published in PMLA“? While most Americans never bothered to acquaint themselves with old readings of Renaissance texts, the eggheads at the MLA insist on producing “New Readings of Renaissance Texts.”
And there’s much, much more. But all of it is about unimportant nonsense.
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The Reader and the Page
John Lingan’s essay on William Gaddis in the latest Quarterly Converstation is very good, one of the best analyses of Gaddis’s work I’ve read recently. I particularly like this description of The Recognitions and JR:
Gaddis anticipated postmodern American literature’s obsessions with entropy and the “death of the author,” but he shared the high modernists’ attention to form. Like Joyce peppering Ulysses’s newsroom scene with capitalized headlines, Gaddis constructed The Recognitions and JR as mimetic of their subjects—the former is as bulging and ornate as the Flemish paintings that protagonist Wyatt Gwyon is paid to forge, and the latter is one continuous flood of voices, frequently unidentified, that recall either a stock ticker’s relentlessness or an overlapping teleconference. . . .
I also mostly agree with this characterization of Gaddis’s work:
Just as his novels JR and A Frolic of His Own announce their subjects (”Money . . . ?” and “Justice?” respectively) in their opening sentences, William Gaddis’s career could have started with the question, “Work?” No single word better encapsulates the concerns and organizing metaphor for Gaddis’s artistic project, in which he chronicles the myriad ways that postwar industrial American culture devalues and drowns out individual expression in an endless barrage of information. His concerns were weighty—nothing less than the erosion of western culture and society—but Gaddis’s novels are ultimately saved from grim systemic coldness by his emphasis on work, which he defined strictly and defended with religious zeal. To Gaddis, work equaled an individual effort (best exemplified by the sympathetic and underappreciated artists of his first novels, The Recognitions and JR) to sort through the swarming cultural ephemera and create, with monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce. Since Gaddis believed the two to be tantamount, his emphasis on the value of work was nothing less than a defense of the artistic impulse itself.
I don’t think that Gaddis avoids “grim systemic coldness” simply through his depiction of work (a point on which I elaborate below), but that the “work” of art holds special value for him is clearly enough illustrated in his novels.
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December 21
Combobulated: Being a Play in Which We Laugh at Arrogant Undergraduates
(In a small classrroom, a young professor is discussing an R.P. Blackmur essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets with a group of twelve or so students.)
TEACHER: Blackmur claims “the hues attract, draw, steal men’s eyes, but penetrate, discombobolate, amaze the souls or psyches of women.” What does he mean by that?
CLASS: ...?
TEACHER: Break his sentence down. What does “discombobulate” mean?
STUDENT #1: Bored?
TEACHER: So Shakespeare’s language penetrates the souls of women by boring them? (two engineering majors giggle) How do you amaze someone by boring them?
STUDENT #2: (confidently) It’s a technical term from Switzerland. Watchmakers call the tiny gears inside a watch “bobulates” (beaming) and what a watchmaker does is he brings the bobulates together, and “com” is the Latin for “together.” So the proper technical term for this watch here (points to his wrist), or any working watch, is to say it’s “combobulated.” But over the life of a watch, it gets knocked around, and the gears get unaligned, and when that happens the watch becomes “discombobulated.”
TEACHER: Not “disbobulated”?
STUDENT #2: That’s what I said, but he told me--
TEACHER: He who?
STUDENT #2: My rabbi.
TEACHER: I see.
STUDENT #2: He said the Swiss wouldn’t be taken seriously if they didn’t keep the Latin in there, because “bobulate” sounds silly enough without the Latin prefix.
TEACHER: Isn’t “dis” a Latin prefix?
STUDENT #2: I didn’t know that then.
TEACHER: So what do you think Blackmur meant?
STUDENT #2: ...?
I still don’t know what Blackmur meant--nor why my rabbi conspired with The Future to punk me--but as the MLA approaches, I’m increasingly convinced that the first time I ever spoke up in class foreshadowed some ominous end to my academic career.* So while I’m not exactly sure what end this start augurs, I take comfort in the fact that Dickens didn’t know what he’d foreshadowed for Pip when he wrote the first installment of Great Expectations.** (Or he wouldn’t have written two endings.)
*The other lesson? Never trust the Jews.
**Not that scholars have written much about this. The only exception I can think of is about Buffy--but that might be because I only dipped my toe in Dickensian waters. (Work on Wharton’s serialized novels focuses on how she altered the plot or how she mimicked James, so even though I should’ve encountered something about it researching my Wharton chapter, I didn’t.)
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December 19
Some Critical Blunders By the MLA
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. Really, watch it: she’s a much better filmmaker than I’ll ever be.
All reports of this kind are a compromise, and not all compromises are successful. The authors of this report are frank about being divided on the issue of nontenurable faculty between the meliorative, pragmatic and sometimes apologist position long represented by committee chair David Bartholomae and the view, long represented by committee member Paul Lauter, that a permanently nontenurable faculty is “an illegitimate exercise of institutional authority.” The effective compromise between these positions is the committee’s endorsement of rights and privileges for the nontenurable that are as similar as possible to those of the tenured. (Elsewhere, I’ve written about this kind of compromise under the heading of “the intricate evasions of as.”)
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What the MLA Got Right
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
Along with graduate student activists, and members of the Radical Caucus like Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson has for two decades urged the MLA to commit more resources to the needs and issues of faculty serving contingently. If you’re going to be at the convention, stop by the SUNY booth to meet him and get him to inscribe a copy of the splendid festschrift devoted to his exemplary, selfless career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. Monday, December 29, 2008, 11am - 12pm
In part 1 of this series, I said that the MLA report on the workforce in English is a mixed bag—important new commitments to higher standards of data gathering and analysis and some good recommendations, but also some oversights and blunders regarding the circumstances, views, and needs of the workforce they were reporting on. I also shared some key facts from the report, including that women disproportionately fill the worst-paying jobs, and that English is unique in having lost 3,000 tenure-track lines in the ten years before 2004. All indications are that the bleeding will continue—this year’s advertised positions are down 22%, and many of the advertised searches are cancelled, or will be.
In this part, I want to focus on kudos for some of the report’s key recommendations.
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